Spontaneous Human
Confabulation:

Requiem for Phyllis

by Jan Willem Nienhuys <janwillemnienhuys@gmail.com>

According to popular books on the unexplained,
a young woman burst into flames
spontaneously in a crowded discotheque in
Soho, London, and burnt to ashes in minutes.
This extraordinary event apparently occurred
at the end of the 1950s.

The story of Maybelle Andrews dying such a
tragic and mysterious way has appeared in a number
of versions. In April 1999 it surfaced in the
respectable world of a magazine about the Dutch
language (where it caught my attention).
The discotheque disaster was mentioned in
an article about Dutch words for spontaneous
human combustion, or SHC. The inspiration for
that article was a 1991 firefighter's magazine.
The story may have appeared reliable
because firemen supposedly don't tell old wives' tales.

Having investigated the various ways in
which this and other similar stories have been
reported in books and magazines I can
shed light on the tale's origin.

The Making of a Horror Story

Where does the Maybelle Andrews story come
from? In itself it is highly implausible. Just
for a start, an adult human body can't burn within five
minutes just like that. Because of the short time
involved, it would require a very high temperature,
but the total heat of combustion of the human body is
such that the effect would be similar to burning
ten liters (or quarts) of gasoline within five
minutes. The nightclub would have been gutted,
and all people present would have died of a
combination of lack of oxygen and smoke poisoning.

But the story of Maybelle isn't unique in the annals
of SHC. There is a similar story that dates back to
the sad death of Phyllis Newcombe as a consequence
of a fire at the ballroom of the Shire Hall in
Chelmsford, England, in 1938.

The story about Phyllis's accident first entered
the world outside Essex through an item about the
inquest, published in the Daily Telegraph on
September 20, 1938. That story was somewhat
unclear, because it didn't mention the date of
Phyllis's death, and paid inordinately much more
attention to the fact that the ambulance had
taken all of twenty minutes to arrive. This may have
given superficial readers the impression that the
ambulance was too late to save Phyllis. Prominent
in the story was a quote from Coroner L.F. Beccles:
'From all my experience I have never come a case so
very mysterious as this.'

The first author to write about Phyllis was
science fiction writer Eric Frank Russell. In
the May 1942 issue of Tomorrow, in the section
'Scientific Fantasy,' he described all kinds of
mysterious deaths, including puzzling fire
deaths. Of the latter he summarized nineteen cases
(all from 1938 and the first week of 1939) that
he had culled from British newspapers. He didn't
mention Phyllis by name:

'Chelmsford woman burned to death in a dance
hall' was followed by Beccles's quote. A
revised version of Russell's article was printed
in Fate (December 1950), and this was reprinted
in March 1955 in the UK edition of Fate. In
Fate 'a dance hall' was changed to 'in the middle
of a dance hall' and Beccles' quote read 'as mysterious'
rather than 'so very mysterious.'

In Great World Mysteries Russell (1957)
considerably embellished the story. The
atmosphere on the dance floor is set by 'Couples
glided around the floor, others chatted and
sipped soft drinks,' the victim (still unnamed)
'burst into flames bang in the middle of a dance
hall' and the remark is added that the victim
didn't smoke and that she hadn't been in contact
with cigarettes. Russell writes: 'She roared
like a blow-torch and no man could save her.'

This version was probably the source for an
article in True (May 1964) by the American writer
Allan W. Eckert. He dated the accident on
September 20, made the location 'the midst of a
crowded dance floor,' let the poor girl 'burst
into intense blue flames' (like a blow-torch?),
made her crumple silently to the floor, and
'neither her escort nor other would-be rescuers
could extinguish the flames. In minutes she was
ashes, unrecognizable as a human being.' Then
Eckert made up the first name 'Leslie' for
Beccles (and changed the quote again). The
article was illustrated by a full page picture
of a Marilyn Monroe-esque woman in a sexy pose
wrapped in flames.

When I e-mailed Eckert to
ask for the source of his story (which I knew
originally only through quotes) he e-mailed back
that he lost his notes and didn't even have a
copy of his own article.

The creator of the Bermuda Triangle, Vincent
Gaddis, combines Eckert's version ('bluish
flames,' 'within minutes a blackened mass of
ashes') with Russell's Fate article ('middle of
dance floor'). His Beccles quote is a mix of
Russell's and Eckert's versions. Gaddis plays
the scholar by giving the Daily
Telegraph reference, but judging from his text
he never set eyes on that source.

Some of Schurmacher's cases are word for word
identical to Russell's, some differ somewhat
in wording but not in content, and he seems
to mix up Russell's sources.

The story of Phyllis is transmogrified further.
Schurmacher's version gives the impression that he
has seen the Daily Telegraph story, but that he had
only Russell's book on hand when he wrote it up. He
doesn't mention a source at all, and has only 'October'
as a date. Shop manageress Phyllis Newcombe, age 22
(she ran a confectionery store owned by her father)
became typist Maybelle Andrews (19), her fiancé
Henry McAusland became Billy Clifford (22), the
Shire Hall ballroom became 'one of London's Soho
nightspots' and 'Maybelle' burst into flames while
dancing the watusi. The fire was extinguished by
hands and a topcoat, but Maybelle died in the
ambulance.

As poignant detail Schurmacher pictures Billy 'with
his burned hands swathed in bandages' at the inquest.
(The Telegraph does mention the fiancé helping to
put out the fire but more detailed stories in other,
local, newspapers say nothing about his role in
extinguishing the fire.) The remarks of the coroner
are somewhat expanded, but they start with 'In all
my experience I have never been confronted by a case
as fantastic as this'. The coroner's name is changed to
James F. Duncan. Coincidentally both Russell's
Fate article and book mention a burn victim named James
Duncan from Ballina Co. Mayo, Ireland in close proximity,
opposite column or page.

We can safely assume that no one approximately called
Maybelle Andrews died in or near London in 1938, or at
the end of the 1950s, as Schurmacher later wrote for
Reader's Digest. A search of the register of births
and deaths using various spellings can find no trace of
the death of a Maybelle Andrews between the first quarter
of 1936 to the last quarter of 1946 or between January
1955 to December 1960. The British investigator Melvin
Harris has been looking for Maybelle Andrews as well,
and in vain. He also thinks that Maybelle is just Phyllis.

Rhythmic Rotations

The following turn on the wheel of fantasy is by
Michael Harrison. In Fire from Heaven (1976) he
writes that he takes his story about Phyllis from
the Daily Telegraph. He even thanks the newspaper's librarian
for providing him with the article. In his story
he combines the blue flames and the 'blackened mass
of ashes' of Gaddis with the boyfriend who 'tried
to beat the flames out with his bare hands' of
Schurmacher. Harrison lets Phyllis die in just
two minutes.

The jacket blurb of Harrison's book mentions
three cases to whet the appetites of his
readers, and one of them says: 'Phyllis Newcombe
engulfed in blue flames on a dance floor and
burned to black ash in minutes.' Harrison
describes the party in the Shire hall as a
'weekly hop' (with quotation marks, as if he is
taking it from the Telegraph) and he describes the
inquest as a contest between a prejudiced coroner
and the stand-fast and inquiring father. Harrison
quotes Beccles too, but he copies Gaddis, rather
than the Daily Telegraph.

Then Harrison discusses the Maybelle case and digresses
on the remarkable parallels, even surmising that the
mysterious fire from heaven must be attracted to
rhythmically rotating movements of dancers!

Ablaze! (1995) by Larry E. Arnold is a 500-page
book filled to the brim with an immense cluttered
mass of descriptions and conjectures, with confused
source references and without index. Arnold also
describes the death of Phyllis Newcombe (on page
200-201). He writes as if he knows what was in the
Daily Telegraph, but he appears to rely completely
on Russell, Eckert and especially Harrison and his
numerous distortions, except for the quote of 'Beecles'
[sic] which is exactly as it is in the Telegraph and
in Russell's 1942 version. However, Arnold also read
the local newspapers (The Essex Chronicle
of September 2, 1938 and The Essex Weekly News of 2
and 23 September) and expresses puzzlement at the
fact that the story there differs so much from
Harrison's. That humans can make things up often
seems too fantastic for purveyors of the paranormal.

Maybelle Andrews is mentioned by Arnold as well, now as
a case from October 1938. For Maybelle Arnold refers to a
personal communication from journalist Harrison,
who 'remembered' the words of coroner James F.
Duncan, coincidentally precisely as Schurmacher
rendered them. Six lines down the other James Duncan
pops up in Ablaze!, but this remarkable
coincidence apparently didn't ring any alarm
bells with Arnold.

And so it goes on. Colin Wilson copies
Schurmacher in The Occult (1971), Lynn Picknett
(a leading authority on the paranormal' according
to the blurb) copies Harrison in Flights of
Fancy? (1987), but locates the Shire Hall in Romford
and dates Maybelle in the 1920s. Nigel Blundell
summarizes Phyllis and Maybelle in
precisely six lines in The Supernatural (1996).

In Mysteries of the Unexplained (1982, published by
Reader's Digest) the tragedy in Chelmsford is also
copied from Harrison, with precise references to
Gaddis and Eckert. In Strange Stories, Amazing
Facts (1976), also published by Reader's Digest, we find an item
written by Schurmacher himself, captioned
'Strange cases of human incendiary bombs' and
adapted from his own book. Here he dates the
event 'in the late 1950's'.

In 1967 Schurmacher let Maybelle die on the way to
hospital from inhaled smoke, but in 1976 it's
first-degree burns that were fatal even before the
flames were out. One wonders why instantaneous death
by first-degree burns didn't graduate from Reader's
Digest into the medical literature.

Spontaneous Human Combustion by Jenny Randles and
Peter Hough appeared in 1992. They also mention
the cases of Phyllis and Maybelle, and they say
that they cribbed the whole story from Harrison.
That's only partly true: their version of
Billy Clifford's testimony is straight out of
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts and their date
'late 50s' comes from the same uncredited source.

Randles and Hough use the cases of Phyllis and
Maybelle to surmise that music and dance can attract
dangerous kundalini energy. They do not consider that
surely billions of energetic dances have
been performed in the twentieth century alone without
the dancers bursting into flames.

It was the Dutch translation of the Reader's Digest
1976 book (lacking any references whatsoever and
omitting the first-degree burns) that formed the
inspiration for a column in Flevo-alarm of June 1991,
the newsletter of the fire brigade of Lelystad, and
hence the source of a 1999 discussion in a magazine
dedicated to the Dutch language.

The True Story of Phyllis

Reading the local newspapers about the tragedy
of Phyllis yields a completely different picture.

The English soccer season started again at the
end of August 1938, and the Chelmsford City
Football Club played its first match on Saturday,
August 27. The C.C. Supporters' Club organised
a dance party for the occasion in the venerable
Shire Hall (no 'weekly hop' as Harrison imagined).

The mayor of Chelmsford and other town dignitaries
graced the festivities. Among the 400 attendees was
Phyllis Newcombe and her fiancé Henry McAusland
('Mack' to his friends). Phyllis had put on her
best dress. It resembled a crinoline, billowing
out and sweeping the floor and was made of white
tulle with satin underneath and a dark blue waist
sash.

When the party was over at midnight, Phyllis and
Mack stayed a bit longer to talk and to avoid the
rush of the departing revellers, but then they
left too. Mack walked a few paces in front of
Phyllis, but when he had reached the staircase
(the ballroom was at the first floor of the Shire
Hall, i.e. second floor in U.S. parlance), about fifteen
feet from the ballroom exit, he heard Phyllis
scream behind him. He turned around and saw
the bottom front of the tulle dress burning very
brightly and furiously.

The dress of Phyllis Newcombe caught fire when Mack stood at
the top of this staircase, with Phyllis a few paces behind him.

Phyllis ran back to the ballroom, where about
twenty people were talking together in small
groups. They saw her stumble inside, all ablaze,
collapsing in the entrance. Mr. Herbert Jewell,
one of C.C.F.C.'s directors, immediately took
action, he and five others rushed to the rescue,
wrapped her in coats, getting singed eyelashes,
eyebrows and cheeks in the process. An ambulance
was called, which arrived in twenty minutes, and
Phyllis was taken to Chelmsford Hospital. She was
diagnosed with serious burns on her legs, arms and chest.

At first she seemed to be making quite good
progress (her sister Edna, now living in California,
tells of Phyllis drinking champagne) but the wounds
became septic, and led to pneumonia. And that soon
killed her. Even now, in the era of antibiotics, death
due to sepsis is a dreaded result of serious burn
wounds. Phyllis died on Thursday, September 15, 1938.
The inquest was held on Monday, September 19, 1938
in the same Shire Hall, which had been a Crown Court
since 1791.

Immediately after the accident it was conjectured
that the dress had caught fire through contact
with a cigarette end or a lighted match, thrown
down from a higher place above the stairs. But
witnesses hadn't seen anybody there, and moreover
Phyllis's father, George, had been experimenting
with the tulle and he had found that it wouldn't
catch fire by contact with a burning cigarette,
let alone by a grazing contact such as with a
falling cigarette end or by the hem of the dress
sweeping over it. It's nearly impossible to set
fire to a piece of cloth with a lighted cigarette.

George Newcombe repeated his test in front of coroner
L.F. Beccle (not 'Beccles' as reported by the Daily
Telegraph and all others). McAusland conjectured that
the dress might have acquired extra combustibility from
the vapors of a chemical cleaning agent used six
weeks earlier, but the coroner didn't go along with
this theory.

A match that would have been forcibly thrown from
a higher place (a balcony over the staircase)
would probably be out before it reached the
floor. Also, Phyllis's dress caught fire on a
spot not directly underneath that balcony.
Beccle conjectured that the fire probably
was caused by a burning match on the ground.

Now how could a burning match be lying on the
ground? I have to do a little guessing here. Smoking
was not allowed in the ballroom, but the normal
behavior of smokers is to light up as soon as
they leave a non-smoking area (they don't drop
many cigarette ends then). They light their
cigarettes with a match and extinguish the match,
for example with a habitual wrist movement and
then drop it unthinkingly. The match will go out
immediately when it hits a stone floor.

However, when the match falls on a somewhat softer
surface it occasionally stays burning for up to
five seconds. The floor at the exit of the
ballroom was described by the coroner as made of
rubber and a witness testified that a lighted
match on the floor could go on burning. If my
conjecture is correct, the source of the fire was
a match thrown on the floor by someone who walked
at most five steps in front of her. Phyllis
was an indirect victim of nicotinism.

Beccle asked whether a burnt match was found, but police
constable Thorogood stated that he hadn't found any. He
also hadn't found any cigarettes butts where
Phyllis's dress caught fire.

This isn't very remarkable. Immediately after
the accident there must have been quite a few
people passing the spot, coming and going, and an
already completely burnt match can easily have
been trampled completely, or alternatively, the
match can have been displaced as the hem of Phyllis's
dress swept over it. It is a common feature of
fires that their precise source can't be found
anymore.

So, even though there is an obvious explanation
for the accident, it remains a peculiar
coincidence for which there is only indirect
proof: the place where the fire was first seen
on the dress (in front, near the ground), the
fact that given the quick spread of the fire it
must have started right there and then, and
the fact that the dress could only catch fire
by contact with a flame. Coroner Beccle
commented: 'In all my experience I have not met
anything so very mysterious as this.' Both local
newspapers gave the same version of the quote.

It stands to reason that I am not the first who
has tried to guess what precisely happened.
Possibly Phyllis knew too. In the hospital Mack
asked if she knew the careless devil that had
thrown the cigarette end. She answered: 'What does it
matter as long as I get right again?' This answer
might suggest that she knew what must have happened,
but that she was such a sweet person that she didn't
want to say.

Phyllis was buried on Wednesday, September 21.
Many people attended, both at the service in the
cathedral and at the cemetery itself. The
Essex Weekly News reported 60 floral tributes.
The accident had been an enormous shock to Phyllis's
parents, who were on a holiday at the beach with
Edna and possibly her three brothers too. Mack was
killed while serving the RAF as a pilot in 1943. Phyllis's
grave is unmarked, and the official history of
Shire Hall describes the incident without mentioning
her name.

Fiery Trident from Heaven

The Phyllis case of myth-mongering doesn't stand
alone. During my investigations I stumbled on
other ludicrous and demonstrably made-up SHC stories.

Take for example the case of Willem ten Bruik.
Russell doesn't mention him in 1942, but he
writes in 1950 that 'a Dutchman Willy Ten Bruik
had been lugged out of his car near Nimegen [sic].
Willy was a cinder. The car was little damaged...'
The source was 'a translated report taken from an
unnamed Dutch paper.' It's not clear whether he
received the report in April 1938, or whether
that was the time of the event. In Russell's
book it is the latter, and he says that it was 'a
datum mailed in 1941'. This is curious because
at that time Holland was occupied by the
Germans, who were at war with the British (among
others) and mail service to the United Kingdom was
definitely below standards.

Gaddis takes from an article by Michael
MacDougall in the (Newark, N.J.) Sunday
Star-Ledger of March 13, 1966 the information
that one William Ten Bruik died in a Volkswagen, and
that the accident happened on April 7, 1938 in
Nijmegen (near the east border of the
Netherlands). This is strange for three
reasons.

In the first place Ferdinand Porsche's design for
a new type of car was revealed for the
first time in the summer of 1938 in New York, and
on July 3, 1938, the New York Times coined the
word 'Beetle' for the car which was then officially
known as KdF-Wagen. The first stone for the
factory was laid on May 26, 1938, by Hitler
himself, but civilian production only started
after the World War, and only in 1947 were the first
fifty-six Beetles delivered to the Dutch importer.

In the second place the name ten Bruik doesn't
occur in the Netherlands, at least not in
telephone books now in use. There are many 'ten
Brink' and a few 'Bruikman,' but no ten Bruik.
The Dutch word ten suggests a location (like
brink which means village square) and Bruik
means usage, so by its formation the name is odd.

In the third place investigations by municipal
authorities, police and newspapers in the
neighborhood of Nijmegen have not found a
newspaper story or a registered death that
corresponds to this case. These authorities know
the story, because every now and then they are
questioned about it. The first such question was
asked by UFO researcher Philip J. Klass in 1967, who
was checking an embellishment of the MacDougall
story as told in a UFO book. Ever since then
helpful Dutch officials have been searching old
newspapers and archives to no avail.

The story of Willem ten Bruik is told in
connection with two other burnings in vehicles,
one in Upton-by-Chester near Liverpool and the
other involved helmsman John Greeley aboard the
S.S. Ulrich in the Irish sea. The special thing
about these cases was supposed to be that they
happened at exactly the same time: 1:14 P.M. in the
Irish Sea, 2:14 P.M. in Upton-by-Chester and 3:14 P.M.
in Nijmegen, at least that is what the UFO book
said. How events presumably known only by their
results can be timed so exactly is a miracle in
itself.

In Upton-by-Chester the victim was called George
Turner. In reality it was Edgar Beattie around 5 P.M. on
April 4. The April 7 date belongs to the issue
of the Liverpool Echo, the source for Russell's
report on this. In Fate the ten Bruik story follows
the Upton-by-Chester report, accompanied by the indication
'same month, same year', and that was all
MacDougall needed to assert a miraculous
coincidence. Schurmacher mentions the Beattie case
too (with the Daily Telegraph as reference) but
he provides the victim (unnamed by Russell) with
the name A.F. Smith. Schurmacher seems to like the
middle initial F. This made Harrison point out the
remarkable coincidence of two similar accidents
on the same spot: another proof of the strange
pattern-seeking behavior of the fire from heaven.

Whatever happened in the Irish Sea on April 7,
1938, it can't have been aboard the S.S. Ulrich,
because that ship never existed, as Philip Klass
established. Larry Arnold writes that he
couldn't find any deaths of Turner and Greeley in
British newspapers around that time.

The simultaneity of these events is also
problematic: the Irish Sea has the same time zone
as Greenwich, and before WWII Dutch summer time
was only 20 minutes ahead of Greenwich, not a
full hour.

Harrison exaggerates this story even further. He
blames Russell that he missed a curious
geographical coincidence related to this triple
death. This shows that Harrison reads things in Russell's
work that simply aren't there,
because Russell didn't mention Greeley or the
S.S. Ulrich. Harrison claimed that the three
accidents happened at the vertices of a giant
equilateral triangle, and that the names of the
spots (Ulrich, Upton and Ubbergen near Nijmegen)
also start with the same sound.

Then Arnold told Harrison that equilateral
triangle wasn't what the map said. The S.S.
Ulrich would have to have been a few miles west
of Le Mans for that, deep inside France.
Fortean Times editor Bob Rickard made
fun of the dubious 'same sound' theory. Harrison
changed in the next printing equilateral to
isosceles, by moving Nijmegen to the south west
of the Netherlands, the neighborhood of Antwerp.
He remarked that the three names really had the
same 'oo' sound, because of the dialect near
Chester. Unbeknownst to him the Dutch deviously
went on pronouncing the first letter of Ubbergen
like the 'ou' in double or the 'e' in butter.

I will leave now the discussion of the mysterious
trident of fiction that struck Earth on that
memorable April 7, 1938.

I wanted to illustrate that whoever tries to
investigate or explain stories of spontaneous
human combustion (or other tall tales) should
take into account that these stories can be
distorted enormously, not only by eyewitnesses
and newspaper journalists, but foremost by
creative writers. They will change many details,
leave them out or add them, make up names and
dates and moreover they copy each other &150; often
without mentioning their sources &150; so the
distortions accumulate.

Bookstores are filled with good fiction, and
these twisted, illogical, horror stories about
so-called miraculous events couldn't be peddled to
the public if the authors didn't pretend that it
all had actually happened.

I see them as ghouls preying on the death and
misery of other people to earn money and fame or
convert others to their silly superstitions.
They should let the dead rest in peace, or rather
preserve their memory as they really were.